September 17, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
A pastor once told of a story when a man awoke one morning to find his wife of many years lying dead beside him. In the next few days, it was as if his systems of thought, feeling, and perception just shut down. It was as if someone just switched off his connectors to the outside world. At first, he grew silent, unresponsive to others. Then he seemed to stop feeling, to gradually become unaware of the world about him, an island of unfeeling unto himself.
This man became for me not just a tragedy but also a metaphor, an image of what the world has caused among many of us. We are bombarded everyday by TV ads and Madison Avenue marketers. We are shocked by scenes of carnage and mayhem on the eleven o’clock news. And with some of our jobs, we are numbed by routine and boredom that we shut down. Many people seem to just shut down, to switch off their circuits to the world around them.
Sometimes like this past week, I was overwhelmed by the number of things that I felt I needed to do. I was stressed out. My plate was too full and I needed to learn how to pay attention to only those things that were priorities. I wanted to shut down all the distractions around me.
You see, as human beings we can only take so much. Meant to live in rural, relative quiet surroundings, we have only been urbanites for a few centuries. Modern life is too intruding. We suffer from psychic overload. And in defense, we shut down.
Like the man who suffered the shock of his wife’s death, some sharp pain overwhelms us. In horror, we withdraw, we curl into a protective ball, develop an outer shell for self-defense.
A social worker once said, “If you stop what you’re doing, even for a moment, and dare to think about the big picture or ask yourself big questions, you’ll go crazy. The problems are just too big, the human needs so overwhelming.” It takes guts to pay attention.
“Eat My Flesh”
Today’s Scripture comes from a larger chapter in John’s gospel that speaks about Jesus as the Bread of Life. Jesus first performs the miracle of feeding 5000 people by taking only five loaves of bread and two fish. Trying to just feed that many people must have been stressful for his disciples. Then Jesus compares himself with the manna from God that Moses and the Israelites received when they were in the wilderness. Jesus said that he is the bread that has come down from heaven, not to do his will, but to do the will of him who sent him. But then something very peculiar happens.
Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” This teaching is strange and shocking! Eating flesh and drinking blood sounds more like a Hollywood horror flick than good news.
When his disciples heard this, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” We can certainly empathize with the disciples and love them for their honesty. The disciples didn’t want to deal with this kind of teaching. What was Jesus trying to say to them?
Being aware that his disciples were complaining about this teaching, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you?” Jesus was shocking them to get their attention. He is trying to communicate himself to them. Sometimes to get our attention, the speaker must cause some offense.
Sometimes when the world is so overwhelmingly burdensome and we are all stressed out, we may need someone to shock us, to offend us so that we can pay attention again.
Onlooker Consciousness
In our modern world, there is a phenomenon called, “onlooker consciousness.” This is an outlook in life where you see the world detached from your world. You are disengaged from what’s going on. It’s like you are a perpetual tourist, just passing through, uncommitted to anything outside of yourself.
Having an onlooker consciousness is a lie. You can’t perceive the world and not participate in it. However, most of us are conditioned to try to think about things without being tainted by them. We want to keep our distance. So we knock ourselves unconscious, to move through life detached. We call it, “keeping things in perspective.” We try to stand untouched on higher ground where we stand above everything.
Why? We have this onlooker consciousness because paying attention to the world is painful. When Jesus taught the disciples about eternal life, it was so difficult and painful for some followers that “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” The cost of consciousness is great. Pain is the price we pay for attention.
Paying Attention at Church
When you come to church today, you decided to pay attention to God. You are a member of a minority of modern Americans who are expending time and effort to attempt to love God, and to risk thereby being loved by God. The cost of you being here is great. (And I hope that listening to my sermons is not too painful!)
Paying attention to the world is like learning how to look at art. If you’ve ever noticed art, you know that it takes time, training. You get better at noticing it as you go along. When you first look at a great painting, it may not seem great to you at all. It takes time to know what the artist is up to, how the painting is asking you to expand your ways of seeing and knowing.
The works of God are like that. Knowing or having consciousness is not a spectator sport. There is a sense on which God graciously needs you, not to be God, but to be co-creator of the world. When you go out on a hike on a crisp autumn day in the East Coast to see the changing leaves of autumn, you might say, “Wow, look at these beautiful trees God had made.” But we need to also say, “We have to notice them to be trees.”
You see, God needs us, or perhaps graciously grants us some co-creating power to help make the world. God makes the world, and so, by the grace of God, do we. We get to notice. We rummage about this extravagant world that God created and take time to pay attention. Sometimes we need to ignore the forest so that we can see the trees.
With so many things happening at church these days, I have felt overwhelmed. So this past week, I was taking out for a very nice dinner to get away from some of this recent stress. When we returned home to our place for coffee, our friends noticed that the leaves on my Hawthorn bonsai had started to change colors: from summer green to this dazzling autumn red. In the midst of everything that was going on, I haven’t stopped to notice.
God needs a people willing to notice what is going on in the world, willing to submit themselves as sinners who are in need of forgiveness, willing to name the name of Jesus Christ as Lord, willing to risk witness to a true God who lives, and rules and loves. God wants us to not retreat into ourselves with an onlooker consciousness and keeping everything at a distance. God wants us to pay attention to what Jesus Christ is saying.
Hard Sayings
Paying attention to God means that we must take Jesus’ teachings seriously. Jesus knew that there were some disciples who started complaining about what they heard. So he shocked them by saying that they who eat his flesh and drink his blood will abide with him and he with them. He told them that “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” This offended them some more.
When we are really hearing what Jesus is saying we realize that these are hard sayings to take. It costs something to worship and thereby to serve the true, living God. In order to pay attention to God, we must pay less attention to our own need for attention and give attention to God. We need to pay less attention to the distractions of TV and bombardment of advertisements and more attention to God’s message.
Modern people have said for some time that they feel distant from God, that God is dead, or that the world no longer needs a God to speak to them, much less a Savior. Some have lost the lust to hear and most things have become mute. Some have lost the vision to see and most things have become cloudy. Some have lost the interest to pay attention to God and many have become withdrawn inward into themselves. If we are unable to hear the birds, or notice a sunset, or the turning of leaves to dazzling red, how could we be expected to be attentive enough to see and know God?
When Jesus steps out before his disciples and says, “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” he shocks them and us to get our attention. We perk up and wonder what on earth (or heaven) is Jesus talking about?
This is an “in your face” Jesus talking. Gone are the abstractions and theoretical ways of describing what Jesus wanted to tell them. Now he is straight talking with us. For us to encounter Jesus means that we encounter his flesh and blood. In the Hebrew, “flesh and blood” means the whole person. For us to believe Jesus, to receive the whole Jesus, we must receive his flesh and blood. We are what we eat.
Paying Attention to God
Now that we are all awake and perked up, what does paying attention to God like? Paying attention to God is:
1. Gathering in church to listen and focus on God. Attempting to remove the world’s distractions, we discover the truth in Christ that is deep and life giving.
2. Taking responsibility as co-creators. God graciously has granted us powers to help make the world. Rather than an “onlooker consciousness,” we actively participate in the world to bring peace and justice to everyone.
3. Striving to remain “offended and shocked” to know that through God’s sacrificial love in Jesus Christ that we are invited to participate in God’s glory and plan in the world.
Let me close with the telling of a story.
One day the woodcutter took his grandson into the forest for his first experience in selecting and cutting oak trees, which they would later sell to the boat builders. As they walked, the woodcutter explained that the purpose of each tree is contained in its natural shape: some are straight for planks, some have the proper curves for the ribs in a boat, and some are tall for masts. The woodcutter told his grandson that by paying attention to the details of each tree and with experience recognizing these characteristics, someday he too might become the woodcutter of the forest.
A little way into the forest the grandson saw an old oak tree that had never been cut. The boy asked his grandfather if he could cut it down because it was useless for boat building—there were no straight limbs, the trunk was short and gnarled, and the curves were going the wrong way. “We could cut it down for firewood,” the grandson said; “at least then it will be of some use to us.”
The woodcutter replied that for now they should be about the work cutting the proper trees for the boat builders; maybe later they could return to the old oak tree.
After a few hours of cutting the huge trees the grandson grew tired and asked if they could stop for a rest in some cool shade. The woodcutter took his grandson over to the old oak tree, where they rested against the trunk in the cool shade beneath the twisted limbs. After they had rested a while, the woodcutter explained to his grandson the
necessity of attentive awareness and the recognition of everything in the forest and in the world. Some things are readily apparent, like the tall, straight trees; other things are less apparent, requiring closer attention, like recognition of the proper curves in the limbs. And some things might initially appear to have no purpose at all, like the gnarled old oak tree. The woodcutter stated, “You must learn to pay careful attention every day so that you can recognize and discover the purpose God has for everything in creation. For it is this old oak tree, which you so quickly deemed useless except for firewood, that now allows us to rest against its trunk amidst the coolness of it shade.”
In today’s busy and sometimes stressful world, we can find ourselves paying little attention about our faith. When we shut down our senses from understanding the world, we also shut down our desire to know God. We stop paying attention to God because he seems useless in our busy lives.
But Jesus said, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” Jesus shocks us to pay attention to him who is the only one who can grant us eternal life.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, forgive us for being distracted from paying attention to you and your plan for our lives. Lead us to come into your presence with a confessing heart and to know that you are calling us to ministry that will cost us our lives. We pray in the name of Christ, who gave his life so that we may have life everlasting. Amen.